![]() How were we supposed to know Jack was really an undercover agent?” Robbing a bank! We couldn’t come up with a better way to pay off Don Carlo for accidentally getting his son arrested?” “I can’t believe we’re doing this.”Ĭara looked up from her white-knuckled grip on the steering wheel. The bottom line is always: Does it make sense for the characters to be talking about this? What Bad Expository Dialogue Looks LikeĮvan smacked his fist against the Thunderbird’s dashboard. What’s the difference between expository dialogue that works and expository dialogue that doesn’t? Sometimes this works admirably, sometimes not. So they ratchet up the sophistication knob a few notches and sneak that info into their dialogue in less blatant ways. Most writers these days are smart enough to avoid blatant “as you know, Bob” gimmicks. ![]() Too often, this means we might also attempt to limit ourselves to sharing information via expository dialogue. Modern writers are influenced in our storytelling as much, if not more so, by movies and TV than we are by books themselves. ![]() Either, you share it visually (e.g., the bank robber has a gun in his hand) or through dialogue (e.g., the bank teller yells, “He has a gun!”) In a movie, information can be shared in only two ways. I don’t think enough writers understand that a novel isn’t just a movie on paper. Is Expository Dialogue Sneaking Into Your Writing?Īs western author Brad Dennison pointed out in an email: It can slide into dialogue in ways that may not be as egregious as “as you know, Bob,” but are certainly not the best choice for sharing information with your readers. However, expository dialogue can be even subtler and trickier than that. At its rudest and crudest, expository dialogue takes the form of the infamous “as you know, Bob” conversation, in which one character tells another character something the other character already knows, with the first character then telling the second character he knows he knows it. One of the most common ways in which it is abused is by turning it into expository dialogue.Įxpository dialogue is dialogue that explains. However, its very versatility can make dialogue easy to abuse. Because it is the only narrative technique that is a “true” form of showing, instead of telling (aka explaining, aka describing), it also creates some of the strongest and most vibrant sensations in all of writing. It allows us to characterize, to create both context and subtext, to entertain via humor, and to share some of the best and punchiest prose rhythms in the entire book. Dialogue is one of the most versatile of all narrative fiction techniques.
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